8 Zooarchaeology
8.1 Case studies
The following map shows the sites under investigation, divided by chronology. Please select the desired chronology (or chronologies) from the legend on the right.
Legend: R = Roman, LR = Late Roman, EMA = Early Middle Ages, Ma = 11th c. onwards
8.2 Medians
The faunal dataset is large (434+ records) and diversified. Looking at the distributions of each animal, the curve is not gaussian. The best choice for non-normal curves is to use medians instead of means to come up with figures that are less dependent on outliers. The function Medians_Chrono_Zoo() (Section 3.1) can be used to return as output weighted medians for each chronology. The in-depth description of how weights are calculated for each sample can be found in Section 6.4.1. To summarise, sites with a very large (i.e. fuzzy) chronology contribute less to the calculation of the median. Table 8.1 provides the median values of the main categories of faunal remains for each chronology, and Table 8.2 the median values for each century. Stronger colours in the cells indicate higher values.
Show the code
Medians_Categorised_per_Chronology_ZOO <-
data.frame(
Medians_Chrono_Zoo(zooarch_cond, "R")*100,
Medians_Chrono_Zoo(zooarch_cond, "LR")*100,
Medians_Chrono_Zoo(zooarch_cond, "EMA")*100,
Medians_Chrono_Zoo(zooarch_cond, "Ma")*100
)
# Round to 2 digits
Medians_Categorised_per_Chronology_ZOO <- round(Medians_Categorised_per_Chronology_ZOO, 2)
## Weighted medians per century ##
Medians_ZOO_Centuries <- data.frame(
"I BCE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, -1)$Medians,
"I CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 1)$Medians,
"II CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 2)$Medians,
"III CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 3)$Medians,
"IV CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 4)$Medians,
"V CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 5)$Medians,
"VI CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 6)$Medians,
"VII CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 7)$Medians,
"VIII CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 8)$Medians,
"IX CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 9)$Medians,
"X CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 10)$Medians,
"XI CE" = zooarch_tables(zooarch_cond, 11)$Medians
)
# Assigning the colnames (optional - instead of roman numerals)
colnames(Medians_ZOO_Centuries) <- c("1st c. BCE", "1st c. CE", "2nd c.", "3rd c.", "4th c.", "5th c.", "6th c.", "7th c.", "8th c.", "9th c.", "10th c.", "11th c.")
# Rounding the medians
Medians_ZOO_Centuries <- round(Medians_ZOO_Centuries, digits=2)
# Removing categories that are not necessary
Medians_ZOO_Centuries <- Medians_ZOO_Centuries[-c(6:9),]| R | LR | EMA | Ma | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Pigs 
|
48.0 | 38.62 | 35.00 | 35.62 |
Cattle 
|
10.1 | 8.36 | 18.00 | 19.00 |
Caprine 
|
25.0 | 22.08 | 29.00 | 27.00 |
Dom..Fowl 
|
4.0 | 6.00 | 5.00 | 5.00 |
Edible.W..Mammals 
|
5.0 | 3.00 | 3.00 | 3.00 |
Fish 
|
1.0 | 2.00 | 3.93 | 1.00 |
Mollusca 
|
11.0 | 8.00 | 4.00 | 2.89 |
Unedible.Dom..Mammals 
|
2.0 | 3.00 | 3.95 | 2.00 |
Unedible.Wild.Mammals 
|
1.0 | 1.00 | 1.00 | 1.00 |
Pigs’ medians from the Italian peninsula are the highest in each chronology, although their values decrease after the Roman age peak. Cattle medians slightly decrease after the Roman age, even though surprisingly (put a reference here to literature review to explain why surprisingly) the values increase again (18–19.71%) during the early Medieval and Medieval age. The trends for sheeps and goats are also interesting. During the Roman age the Italian median is 25%, slightly decreasing in the 3rd to the 5th century, and increasing again after. When discussing sheep-farming, one must always consider the geographical features from which the data is being collected. This will be discussed later on in the chapter, where more regional and geographical trends will be provided. Domestic fowl (chickens and geese) has quite stable values of 4-5%, with a peak of 7.68% in the 11th century. Wild game peaks during the Roman age, with a median value of 5%, reaching a minimum in the early Middle ages (2%) and rising again in the 11th century. Two considerations must be made for game consumption. The first is that as we will see later on, game consumption is strongly related to the site typology. Secondly, the Roman age value is pulled up by assemblages from the 1st century BCE. After that, the values strongly decrease and by looking at the individual centuries the medians from the 7th century onwards are much higher (ranging from 1.42% to 2.09%).
| Pigs | Cattle | Caprine | Domestic fowl | Wild game | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st c. BCE | 39.70 | 11.41 | 26.07 | 0.00 | 0.76 |
| 1st c. CE | 40.89 | 11.31 | 25.48 | 0.00 | 0.58 |
| 2nd c. | 48.20 | 10.28 | 22.33 | 0.79 | 0.00 |
| 3rd c. | 41.57 | 8.24 | 19.22 | 1.53 | 0.73 |
| 4th c. | 34.15 | 9.56 | 23.23 | 1.79 | 0.98 |
| 5th c. | 34.01 | 13.38 | 24.69 | 2.33 | 0.88 |
| 6th c. | 31.83 | 20.66 | 28.55 | 2.75 | 0.65 |
| 7th c. | 30.42 | 18.52 | 30.14 | 4.51 | 1.58 |
| 8th c. | 33.63 | 13.89 | 30.13 | 2.70 | 1.18 |
| 9th c. | 37.54 | 11.76 | 23.32 | 1.16 | 1.54 |
| 10th c. | 35.77 | 14.36 | 25.64 | 1.63 | 1.93 |
| 11th c. | 34.08 | 19.34 | 27.44 | 1.91 | 2.09 |
| * The color gradients in this table are used to indicate the chronologies. |
9 Context type
9.1 Pigs
9.2 Cattle
Warning: The `size` argument of `element_line()` is deprecated as of ggplot2 3.4.0.
ℹ Please use the `linewidth` argument instead.
9.3 Caprine
9.4 Edible W. Mammals
10 Macroregion
10.1 Pigs
10.2 Cattle
10.3 Caprine
10.4 Edible W. Mammals
11 Geography
11.1 Pigs
11.2 Cattle
11.3 Caprine
11.4 Edible W. Mammals
12 Altitude
Proposed model:
\[ P_{i} \sim BetaBinomial(NISP_{i}, \bar{p}_{i} , \phi_{i}) \]
\[ logit(\bar{p}_{i}) = \alpha_{[ChrID]} + \beta_{[ChrID]} Alt_{i} \]
\[ \alpha_{ChrID} \sim Normal(0,1.5) \]
\[ \beta_{ChrID} \sim Uniform (0,1.5) \]
\[ \phi \sim Exponential(1) \]
12.1 Pigs
12.2 Cattle
12.3 Caprine
12.4 Edible W. Mammals
12.5 Community plot
